New Use for Old Hardware: A Network Copier

A couple of months ago, the combination fax/printer/scanner/copier
stopped using black ink. Right after I bought a new color cartridge,
rats!

This happened about the time the network color laser printer arrived, so
printing was not a problem. And faxing is not particularly common,
certainly not the receipt of something unannounced.

Actually, now that I think about it, it isn't clear whether a fax is
even relevant any more. For me, attachments to e-mail are vastly more
common than anything by fax. I can't even remember when I last sent or
received one.

But it is amazing how dependent one can become on the ability to copy
all kinds of stuff. And the last thing anyone wants to do is to rush
into buying something. What to do?

Well, as it turned out, all the components of a copier were available,
although perhaps not obvious at first. There was no reason to assume
that the combo device suddenly couldn't scan any more. And the new
laser printer works beautifully. We also have: a network, Samba, and
OpenOffice.org. All we need to do is set things up.

Basically the plan is to configure Samba on a PC under GNU/Linux such
that another PC with some flavor of Windows can access a share on it.
Then, the software that came with the combo device can be used on the
Windows machine to scan a document, and save it on a Samba share, in a
directory on the Linux machine. And from there OpenOffice.org can
access the result of scanning, and print it over the network to the
network printer.

Setting up Samba involved nothing more than adjusting a couple of
entries in the configuration file, /etc/samba/smb.conf, and enabling the
user — all of this and the following as root, of course.

This is the configuration file.
Basically it is the file as included with SUSE's 9.2 distribution.
I added a couple of entries, and turned into comments others that
weren't relevant in the current context.
Worth noting are

"encrypt passwords = No" for the Windows 95 client

and

"hosts allow = 192.168.0. 127.0.0.1"

to allow access over the network — the space before "127." is
relevant.

Under Linux, I then issued the following commands:

"testparm | less"
to verify the configuration file

"smbpasswd -a web"
to create a Samba user known on the client Windows machine

"smbpasswd -e web"
to enable this user

"smbd -D" and
"nmbd -D" to start Samba

"smbclient //LohgoPC2b/web"
to verify access to the share defined

On the Windows machine, it was necessary to configure the network
to access the Samba share, something I had done a couple of years earlier.
(This partition on that machine gets almost no use and no modifications.)
For details on that see section 6 of my article, Quick-Start Networking,
in Linux Gazette 87, February 2003.

Having done the above, copying is slightly more complicated than in the
past. The combo device and the network printer both must be on, and the
two participating PCs must have been booted appropriately. I also have
to start Samba, since that doesn't happen on boot, although it would be
quite easy to set that up.

The combo device always had been able to copy brief texts, ca. 2~3
pages, directly. Any more than that required the software and memory of
a Windows machine. So now, copying is initiated as in the past, but not
stand-alone, but rather through the Windows PC. And then, instead of
printing or filing locally, the file is written out to the Samba share
— a folder under Network rather than Desktop. At this point
OpenOffice.org on the Linux PC can read the file, and send it off to the
network printer.

Extremely satisfied with the results, I originally had no intention of
doing anything more, particularly given that Windows is such a pain to
navigate, and it is so difficult to keep keep track of and document what
one has done. But this was easy enough, as has been my experience with
Samba that I decided to create a printer share in order to print
directly from the Windows machine without having to use OpenOffice.org
on the Linux machine.

In well under 30 minutes, the scanner software under Windows
was printing directly to the network printer — well, through Samba on
the Linux machine, but without the steps required with OpenOffice.org.
Essentially, this is exactly the same situation as in the past,
when copying multi-page documents too large for the modest amount of
memory in the combo device.

All that was required was to un-comment the printer share in smb.conf,
and install a network printer under Windows, the same procedure as
described in the article referenced above. It is interesting to note
that the CD-ROM that came with the network printer included a driver for
Windows 95, although I did have to hunt around a bit. So now we have
Samba on SUSE's next-to-latest distribution (9.2) providing a network
printer to a version of Windows that must be something like 10 years
old.

'95 boots about as fast as the network printer can warm up. Perfectly
adequate for a couple of quick copies, when scan quality and color are
not high priority. But an unanticipated consequence of all this is that
the print quality of copying has improved dramatically! The scanner
part of the combo device still works fine, and the laser printer is just
cleaner than the ink-jet ever was.

Let there be no misunderstanding: I'm not suggesting this as an ideal
solution for the need for a copier. But a couple of hours of effort
with the tools that Linux provides and some obsolete hardware and
software (a Pentium 166 with '95) — and no additional expense
— provided a perfectly viable means to copy documents
occasionally. It also bought me the time needed to research the best
way to replace the copier function with a scanner that works well under
Linux.

Edgar is a consultant in the Cologne/Bonn area in Germany.
His day job involves helping a customer with payroll, maintaining
ancient IBM Assembler programs, some occasional COBOL, and
otherwise using QMF, PL/1 and DB/2 under MVS.

(Note: mail that does not contain "linuxgazette" in the subject will be
rejected.)